First things first, my number one fan says maybe I was too hard on Amanda Congdon in my post about Tuesday’s keynote session. Which was not my intent. I enoy Rocketboom, think she is tremendously talented and wish her and her colleagues all the success in the world. I just didn’t get a lot out of her session, and thought it was a bit basic for the Syndicate audience. But she clearly has a lot of passion for what she is doing, and others did enjoy it, so there you have it.
On to Wednesday’s sessions.
Steve Gillmor’s "It’s the Gestures, Stupid" — The title of this session is homage to James Carville’s "It’s the economy, stupid" phrase from the first Clinton election oh so many years ago. As Gillmor pointed out, Carville’s "stupid" (and his as well presumably) was self-reflective — a reminder to himself of what was important, not a commentary on others. Nonetheless, there were quite a lot of us in the room with looks of total incomprehension during Gillmor’s talk. Who all felt a lot better when Doc Searls commented in his closing session that even he doesn’t fully understand what Gillmor is talking about.
So, I am not even going to try and summarize what Gillmor covered in his session, other than to tell you that I *think* the gestures concept and Gillmor’s Gesture Bank (www.gesturebank.com) is an open source model for the aggregation of meta data. I’ve signed up for the public beta because I am now curious. I’m sure more than a few folks did the same. And perhaps that was the primary goal all along. We don’t get it yet, but we will…..
Gillmor was followed by Steven Schwartz of Reuters, "Syndicating the Publishing World." This was a typical polished corporate presentation, with slides and all, that might as well have been titled "Why Reuters loves the Web." Schwartz was extremely good at staying on message — I lost track of the number of times he told us that Reuters is the "world’s largest news agency" 🙂
Thinking about it afterward, the two sessions – Gillmor and Schwartz – couldn’t have been more different. The contrast between Gillmor’s informal style and Schwartz’s corporate demeanor was marked. I didn’t understand everything (much!) of what Gillmor said, but I got the gist that there were some important ideas lurking in "gestures." Whereas, I understood pretty much Schwartz’s whole pitch, but I could have gotten the same information from a Reuters fact sheet.
Tags: Steve Gillmor, Reuters, Syndicate, Corante, gestures, Gesture Bank